Started to get this message when accessing Reddit. I use LibreWolf as a browser, which does indeed provide a more generic user agent to combat fingerprinting, but nothing out of the ordinary either (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/119.0). Anyone else experiencing this?

Edit: seems to have resolved itself. Thanks for confirming I wasn’t doing anything wrong. Let’s hope this isn’t some new algorithm to test if for insufficient fingerprinting so Reddit can kick ad-resistant users.

  • aes@lemm.eeEnglish
    311·
    1 year ago

    Now that Web Environment Integrity is shut down, Reddit decides to take matters into their own hands…

    • __ghost__@lemmy.ml
      371·
      1 year ago

      Little descriptor your browser has to tell websites what it is and where it comes from

      • Wes_Dev@lemmy.ml
        621·
        1 year ago

        It also tells the website the OS you’re running, as well as the browser, and various version numbers of stuff.

        One interesting experiment is to use a user agent changer to view a website, and watch how the website changes every time you load a new user agent.

        Google will remove search options if you’re using Firefox (mobile?), for example. But if you change your user agent to say you have Chrome, even if you are actually using Firefox, those options magically come back and work. It’s almost as if that’s anti-competitive behavior or something…

        It’s also how a lot of websites know whether or not to give you Windows executables or Mac executables, or Linux executables, etc.

        • lud@lemm.ee
          42·
          1 year ago

          Google also changes a bunch of features if you change the user agent to some really old or non existent browser versions.

          I don’t think they are making Firefox worse on purpose. I think it’s just something they don’t bother to fix.

        • TunaCowboy@lemmy.world
          101·
          1 year ago

          It also tells the website the OS you’re running, as well as the browser, and various version numbers of stuff

          While it’s true that many browsers choose to follow a convention that includes that info, User-Agent is just a string, so something like fuku is a legitimate UA

          https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1945#section-10.15

          curl -vA fuku example.com 2>&1 | grep -E '^[<>] (User|HTTP)'
          • Wes_Dev@lemmy.ml
            1·
            1 year ago

            Brilliant example. I think some of the search tools like date range or image color also get removed with the Firefox user agent, but I don’t quite remember.

        • Wrench@lemmy.world
          52·
          1 year ago

          Before the paranoid think it’s invasive, it’s used mainly to tell the website what your browsers capabilities are, so that features work and render properly. And by “tell the website”, I mean they generally serve the same “code” to everyone, and your browser just uses different parts of it.

          It’s not as big of a deal now, but browsers used to render things very differently and had unique style features. Safari is still a big offender of this.

          The above Google search features probably means the developers being Google, probably just thoroughly tested the more niche features on Chrome. And probably at some point, other browsers like Safari shit the bed (common) because they used features that Safari didn’t support at the time, and decided to just disable them for Safari.

          • joel@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            31·
            1 year ago

            Yeah I didn’t think disabling features for Firefox users would make sense. The user would have to know you’re punishing them for it to be effective at incentivising them to switch to chrome.

            I personally don’t trust Google anyway and mainly just use duckduckgo.

    • John Richard@lemmy.world
      143·
      1 year ago

      I honestly don’t think it has anything to do with that. Scrapers going to scrape. They just want more metadata to identify you and know what propaganda to feed to you based on our online habits. The amount of techniques to identify someone based on JS alone should stir a rebellion, but we just accept it. If you have JS enabled, I can tell you what OS you use, what kind of processor you have, info about your graphics card, monitor resolution, etc. I can even identify you based on how your computer renders graphics. Oh, you’ve disabled JS and opted out of us tracking you based on X, Y, Z… great, now we can identify you based on your privacy settings.

  • GOD@lemmings.world
    7·
    1 year ago

    I’m getting that message too, I’ve tried on Firefox, chrome, with and without VPN. I think it’s something wrong with the site?

    Edit: seems to work again now

  • LemmyKnowsBest@lemmy.world
    21111·
    1 year ago

    Reddit is corrupt. It probably has something to do with them wanting to track you, and they can’t track you if you have a blank user agent.

    Stay here at Lemmy where humans are respected as humans instead of data mines. Life is more dignified here at Lemmy.

    • RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.worldEnglish
      241·
      1 year ago

      Stay here at Lemmy where humans are respected as humans instead of data mines. Life is more dignified here at Lemmy.

      I like the sentiment, but it is so incredibly naive to think that there aren’t crawlers scraping every ounce of data from Lemmy as possible. While Lemmy itself may not be collecting user data (depending on who is hosting your home instances of choice), other data that is valuable can still be collected, particularly for LLM AI.

      If you can access it, the data scrapers have already crawled it.

      • helenslunch@feddit.nl
        81·
        1 year ago

        Everything they can get from Lemmy is public and not necessarily tied to any specific person. Like I’m not actually Helen’s lunch.

      • DasAlbatross@lemmy.worldEnglish
        131·
        1 year ago

        Especially considering the post from a little while ago showing that admins of Lemmy instances can see what individual users are upvoting and downvoting. There’s nothing to stop a bad actor from setting up an instance and just harvesting data.

    • Zorro@lemmy.worldEnglish
      271·
      1 year ago

      That’s all well and good but now that the smoke cleared it’s a Twitter/Mastodon situation

      • LemmyKnowsBest@lemmy.world
        202·
        1 year ago

        Yeah. You’re not wrong.

        Ever since I discovered I can have infinite conversations with infinite people about infinite topics, I am addicted to this format.

        Now see how they exploit us 😡

        • KepBen@lemmy.world
          21·
          1 year ago

          I’m my golden socialist utopia online platforms would flourish freely with each new conversation.

      • Wes_Dev@lemmy.ml
        81·
        1 year ago

        I don’t quite understand what you mean. I know Twitter has kind of gone to hell, but beyond that I’m not sure.

        • folkrav@lemmy.ca
          31·
          1 year ago

          I think his point was that most conversations happen where people are, and people are still more on Twitter than Mastodon by multiple orders of magnitude even after the “exodus”.

    • Claidheamh@slrpnk.net
      8·
      1 year ago

      and they can’t track you if you have a blank user agent.

      They absolutely can. A blank user agent is a fingerprint like any other.

    • KrummsHairyBalls@lemmy.ca
      325·
      1 year ago

      Stay here at Lemmy where humans are respected as humans

      I saw a post a few days ago where one Lemmy user threatened to triangulate another user via IP, and then hurt them, because they said Linux doesn’t work out of the box as well as windows in their experience.

      This was on a main instance. The person didn’t get in any trouble.

        • P03 Locke@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          121·
          1 year ago

          You can also see plenty of misogyny, non stop verbal abuse, etc.

          Lemmy is basically a playground for 13 year olds with development difficulties.

          I’m just going to highlight these two sentences, and ask you think really really hard about why this comment has more downvotes than upvotes.

          • Aux@lemmy.world
            01·
            1 year ago

            Truth hurts 13yo kids and they do what they can do best - hit dat downside button hard!

      • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        Was it a shit post? Don’t mistake me as being dismissive of threats, it’s just that “triangulate based on IP” sounds like a joke.

        • KrummsHairyBalls@lemmy.ca
          31·
          1 year ago

          No, unfortunately. The guy seemed really mad. Calling the other guy a moron, idiot, and telling him to apologise. From what I could see from the comments, it seems like the one guy visited the angry guys website, and the guy threatened to use his IP to find out where he lived. Then used threats about how it’s nice to sleep at night without fear, and that if you piss the wrong people off you’ll know.

          All because the guy was having Linux issues and said windows worked better for them. I only found the thread because I’m also having the same issues lol.

        • KrummsHairyBalls@lemmy.ca
          222·
          1 year ago

          Damn. Lemmy is hella doomed when a response to an insane thing someone else did on Lemmy is “who the fuck cares?”.

          Didn’t realize you support people threatening others based on a comment about an operating system.

                • StupidBrotherInLaw@lemmy.world
                  121·
                  1 year ago

                  For someone who doesn’t care, you sure can’t shut up about it.

                  Look how little I care guys. Hey you. Yeah, you. Did you know I don’t care? Totally don’t, 110%. Make sure to tell your friends how few fucks I give about all of this.

                  Why am I still talking about it? Clearly because I care so little. I learned early on that the more you talk about something, the less you care. My utter inability to stop talking about it is the supreme sign of my achieving the pinnacle of carelessness.

              • Xeknos@lemmy.world
                55·
                1 year ago

                Eh, I kind of see where he’s coming from. My response to threats like that is “have fun storming the castle, fuckface.”

      • kgbbot@lemmy.ca
        1·
        1 year ago

        Yo Pop OS is working ony Surface pro 3 perfectly basically, definitely better than Windows 10 was.

  • deepfreezing@lemmy.world
    11·
    1 year ago

    Still ongoing on multiple IP’s and different browsers. Plain Edge and their app works - so it seems that Chrome/Brave and FF are not welcome, which smells like a privacy issue. Well reddit - that was the last straw.

  • ugh@lemm.ee
    231·
    1 year ago

    RiF just kicked me out. I think reddit is trying to do another sweep to break unofficial apps/plug-ins/etc.

  • DontMakeMoreBabies@kbin.social
    2·
    1 year ago

    I’ve got Hermit setup for /r/CombatFootage and it’s still loading fine.

    I’ve got a custom user agent (‘mobile’) and I block everything that I can.

    • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
      41·
      1 year ago

      I would strongly discourage changing your user agent to anything no standard. Doing that makes you extremely easy to spot in a data set